Inside HQ: Introducing Olly Webb
Next in our series of interviews with the Hooper Quinn team, we meet Olly Webb - new Chief Engineer of our Motorsport division.
Who are you and what do you do at Hooper Quinn?
My name is Olly Webb and I am the Chief Engineer of the Motorsport division at Hooper Quinn.
Tell us a little about your career to date and how you arrived at Hooper Quinn?
My engineering career began in earnest in 1999 when, after my A-Levels, I joined Williams F1 as a Trainee Prototype Technician. It was during this year (at the Christmas party in fact) that Patrick took me to one side and told me that, if I wanted to be an engineer, I needed to go to University and study Mechanical Engineering - so that's what I did!
During my career I have worked on multiple motorsport projects (Moto GP, LMP1, F1, BTCC, WTCC, WRC) as well as non-motorsport projects (Bloodhound, HAV, MoD). Prior to Hooper Quinn I was at Williams F1 for ten years working as a Senior Structural Engineer. By the very nature of being a "small" team I worked on pretty much everything except front and rear wings and the crash structures. My last project at Williams was the FW45 chassis.
What do you love about your job?
Hooper Quinn is a relatively new Engineering Consultancy, and I am currently thriving on the challenge of defining and having a hand in the direction we want to take the business in.
I absolutely love coaching and developing the engineers in my team. At Hooper Quinn we are investing in our talent to build a strong, adaptable, and reactive engineering function. As part of this we have a commitment to develop the engineers we take on because ultimately we want our team of experts to offer our clients the best possible solutions to the engineering problems they come to us with.
What is something that usually surprises people about you?
By my very nature I am a bit of an engineering nerd, I love the purity of maths and physics and how you can use them to solve engineering problems. That being said I am very hands on (having been taught to turn, mill, grind, weld, fabricate and assemble complex components on F1 cars whilst at Williams first time round) so when I tell people that I manufacture steel bicycle frames in my home workshop I think this takes them aback sometimes.
Do you have any other hobbies?
I have twin 9-year-old boys which is amazing, and rightly takes much of my extracurricular focus when I'm not working. The boys and I are currently restoring a Series 2a Landrover and they have just bought an engineless go-kart and are currently figuring out what engine they would like to put in it!
When I do find myself with some free time, my partner and I enjoy getting outdoors, be it hiking, gravel biking or paddle boarding. We like going to remote places and I have recently introduced her to the world of bothies!
Good engineering is...
Good engineering is understanding the appropriate level of resolution for a certain problem, or stage of a project, and affording it the correct amount of resource with the appropriate experience to deliver exceptionally well-engineered solutions in a timely manner to meet our clients needs.
I look for the application of sound engineering fundamentals from my team. I’d much rather see a simple hand calculation scribbled on a piece of paper that has taken a few minutes and gets us in the ballpark, than a result from a non-linear, multibody simulation that has taken days and adds little extra insight.
I often see engineers slipping into the minutia of a design and focusing too much on detail which doesn’t improve the solution or add value. For me “good enough today beats perfection tomorrow”.
